My Statement on President Obama’s Prime Time News Conference Last Night

"Forty years ago this week, man first stepped onto the moon. It was an undertaking that took vision, commitment and sacrifice. It will take the same vision, commitment and sacrifice for this nation to meaningfully reform our health care system.

"President Obama has called on Congress to undertake this enormous task which is just as daunting as putting a man on the moon. We applaud President Obama’s leadership and we share his goal of health care reform, but we can’t settle for legislation that lacks the teeth to deliver real and necessary quality and payment reforms.

"The American people need health care reform that addresses the causes of our health care problems and not the symptoms. Hacking blindly away at costs and then claiming to have saved the system money is dangerous and punishes the very people that our health care system is meant to serve: the patients. When talking about reducing overall costs to the Federal budget during the campaign, then candidate Obama suggested taking a scalpel instead of an axe to reform, and that’s precisely how we should be reforming the health care system now.

"We must look at how we pay physicians and other care givers, and develop a payment system that incentivizes quality and positive patient outcomes. Until we completely change the way the U.S. payment system is structured, we’ll never be able to bend the cost curve of health care spending.

"Without payment reform that leads to quality improvement, health information technology adoption, and reduced disparity and variation, we will produce a noble increase in access, but without slowing cost increases. That is a formula for disaster.

"Some have proposed as a way to save money is to cut Medicare Part B reimbursements to specialists such as oncologists and cardiologists. Not only does that not achieve enough savings to be of any use, cutting reimbursement will lead to less access to vital services for people in rural areas and in underserved communities. But it really just shifts costs as the cuts to specialists will be offset by increases to primary care physicians.

"What we need are reforms that allow for the adoption of health information technology, coordination of care so that we can reduce heart failure related hospital readmissions, and the use of evidenced-based guidelines and appropriate use criteria to stop unnecessary medical procedures. And we need incentives to promote partnerships between primary care and specialists in order to better coordinate care for most expensive and complicated chronically ill patients.

"This is, as then candidate Obama suggested, a targeted approach that can achieve real reform with real results and measurable outcomes." 

Full video of the press conference is on WhiteHouse.gov. 

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